Week 6 Lecture Two
Last time:
Oceanic feeling and limits of the ego
Ego and the outside world as source of unpleasure
Pleasure Principle vs. Reality Principle
Moderating our claims to happiness
sublimation
Das Unbehagen in der Kultur couch
Freud, through his medical studies, developed a therapy for mental or nervous illness that also yielded a model of the mind and the mind’s reaction to culture/civilization.
I. Family and State
FAMILY
How do humans form families? For Freud the question is WHY?
Ape-like man, as he began walking upright could no longer smell himself or his potential mate as well.
The sense of smell became devalued or subordinated to vision and erotic stimulation became more a function of vision [still is]
With this shift came a shift in the frequency of the need for genital satisfaction since appearance, unlike odor, was not connected to fertility cycles.
So primitive man started to want sex every day and not just when he was stimulated by certain odors of fertility.
Thus it behooved primitive man to keep his woman around and she stayed with him for the sake of protection and for the sake of her young.
STATE
Civilization is based on the subjugation of the instincts. We not only give up individual liberties in order to form states, but we also give up instinctual satisfaction in order to fit into the cultures that support those states.
[ 49]
II. The Death Instinct (destructive or aggressive instinct)
[69]
“natural”
example of Communism [71-72]
"the inclination to aggression is an original, self-subsisting instinctual disposition in man, and...it constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization....This aggressive instinct is the derivative and the main representative of the death instinct which we have found alongside of Eros and which shares world-dominion with it." (81-82)
III. Aggression and the Super-ego
Development of the super-ego
Uncivilized Bruno/Kaspar
Civilized Bruno/Kaspar
Civilization inhibits aggression, so it is internalized and used against the self as super-ego or conscience.
[89-90]
How can you live with yourself?
IV. The "sense" of guilt
Why does Freud expend so much energy making the distinction between what he sees as an originary act of actual aggression (band of brothers killing the father) and "acts of aggression that have been abstained from"?
Even when we have not DONE anything, we can feel guilty
[103]
The Social Instinct and Its Consequences?
---Our relations with other human beings as a source of unpleasure
---We are driven by both Eros and “Thanatos,” the death instinct
---When these drives/instincts are thwarted, the energy/aggression has to go somewhere
---Into useful cultural work that may result from the super-ego’s bullying of the ego.
---All of this thwarting and bullying results in Discontents/Unbehagen
